The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun

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The (Second Phase of the) Revolution Has Begun

Don't look now, but Prodigy, AOL, and CompuServe are all suddenly obsolete - and Mosaic is well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface.

When it comes to smashing a paradigm, pleasure is not the most important thing. It is the only thing.

If this sounds wrong, consider Mosaic. Mosaic is the celebrated graphical "browser" that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext "links" to other documents. By following the links - click, and the linked document appears - you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition.

Mosaic is not the most direct way to find online information. Nor is it the most powerful. It is merely the most pleasurable way, and in the 18 months since it was released, Mosaic has incited a rush of excitement and commercial energy unprecedented in the history of the Net.

Intense efforts to enhance Mosaic and similar browsers are underway at research institutes around the world. At least six companies are gearing up to sell commercial versions of Mosaic. In April 1994, Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics Inc., helped spur the frenzy, creating the Mosaic Communications Corporation and hiring a half dozen of the most experienced Mosaic developers away from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where Mosaic was born (see "Why I Dig Mosaic"). Two months later, Digital Equipment Corporation announced plans to ship a version of Mosaic (enhanced by Spyglass Inc.) with every machine it sells. Rumors have circulated that Microsoft was secretly licensing Mosaic to incorporate it into Windows. (Microsoft says only that it is "considering" a Mosaic license.) Jim Clark's partner at Mosaic Communications, a 23-year-old University of Illinois graduate named Marc Andreessen, will tell you with a straight face that he expects Mosaic Communications's Mosaic to become the world's standard interface to electronic information.

Long-frustrated dreams of computer liberation - of a universal library, of instantaneous self-publishing, of electronic documents smart enough to answer a reader's questions - are taking advantage of Mosaic to batter once more at the gates of popular consciousness. This time, it looks like they might break through. Mosaic is clumsy but extraordinarily fun. With Mosaic, the online world appears to be a vast, interconnected universe of information. You can enter at any point and begin to wander; no Internet addresses or keyboard commands are necessary. The complex methods of extracting information from the Net are hidden from sight. Almost every person who uses it feels the impulse to add some content of his or her own. Since Mosaic first appeared, according to the NCSA, Net traffic devoted to hypermedia browsing has increased ten-thousandfold.

Looks Count

Ironically, the ingenious network that you see with Mosaic has been around for several years. It is called the World Wide Web, and it was developed by a group of programmers at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (more commonly known by its old French acronym, CERN, for Conseil Europeen pour la Recherche Nucleaire) led by Oxford graduate Tim Berners-Lee. Berners-Lee and his colleagues faced the problem of creating a unified hypertext network for high-energy physicists working in a diverse international environment. They came up with a stunning solution. Rather than attempt to impose standards on the hardware or software, they defined standards for the data. They also created a universal addressing system. Using a relatively simple set of commands, World Wide Web users can turn their documents into hypertext: insert the proper bit of code, and a word becomes a link; insert a different bit of code, and a sentence becomes a headline or begins a new paragraph. With the new addressing system, nearly any Net document - text, picture, sound, or video - can be retrieved and viewed on the World Wide Web.

The beauty of this approach is that it allows maximum openness and flexibility. All World Wide Web documents are similar, but every World Wide Web reader, or browser, can be different. From the smallest laptop to the most outrageous supercomputer, nearly every machine can hook into the Web. The Web, despite its sophisticated hypertext capabilities, is as catholic as the Net itself. All you need for exploring is a browser.

This, of course, is where Mosaic comes in. The first World Wide Web documents and browsers were functional but off-putting. They were not point-and-click. They did not have colors or images. But the Web was free, and as Tim Berners-Lee and other Web developers enriched the standard for structuring data, programmers around the world began to enrich the browsers. One of these programmers was Marc Andreessen, who was working for the NCSA in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. In January 1993, Andreessen released a version of his new, handsome, point-and-click graphical browser for the Web, designed to run on Unix machines. In August, Andreessen and his co-workers at the center released free versions for Macintosh and Windows. In December, a long story about the Web and Mosaic appeared in The New York Times. And by the year's end, browsers were being downloaded from the NCSA at an average rate of more than a thousand per day.

Some programmers active in the World Wide Web community resent all the attention Mosaic has received. They know that the real heart of the World Wide Web is the data standard and the addressing system. They argue that any bozo - or at least any sufficiently talented bozo - can write a browser. "A guy on our project wrote a browser in a week," says one unimpressed programmer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose name I withhold out of sympathy for the administrator of his e-mail account.

Other Web wizards agree. "Mosaic is about to get a boot up the backside," says an experienced developer at CERN in Geneva. "There are an awful lot of good browsers coming out. Mosaic isn't the only one."

These kibitzers are correct: Mosaic isn't the only one. And yet Mosaic is the one that did the trick. The Web statistics tell the tale plainly. The explosion of interest in the World Wide Web began as soon as Andreessen's first Mosaic browser appeared. At that time, in January 1993, there were 50 known Web servers. By October, there were more than 500. By June 1994, there were 1,500.

The secret of Mosaic's success is no mystery. When you browse with Mosaic, you see a series of well-proportioned "pages," with neat headlines and full-color images. You can fiddle with the screen to suit your own preferences. (I like grayish-purple text, with links in blue.) You can mark your progress forward and back in the Web, and make a "hotlist" of places you visit often. On the Macintosh version, which I use, you move up and down the page in the conventional fashion, using a scroll bar on your right.

Mosaic may not be a work of technical genius, but it is hard to stop using. Every day, interesting new hypermedia documents appear. Andreessen and other developers claim there are already at least a million copies of Mosaic on computers around the world.

At the same time, it's hard not to sympathize with the naysayers' irritation. Mosaic illustrates an axiom that many brain-workers find dismaying: looks count. But advocates of hypertext have been struggling to realize their dreams for years without success, and the shadow of disappointment that surrounds the names of earlier hypertext projects - such as Ted Nelson's Xanadu or Bill Atkinson's Hypercard (both of which represented a set of highly interesting ideas about interconnected information) - contrasts sharply with what Mosaic has achieved.

This aesthetically pleasing browser has begun a revolution in the way we experience knowledge. In the world of the Web, knowledge is not something you produce, but something you participate in. A document isn't a self-sufficient individual creation, but a perspective, or collection of perspectives, on the entire Web.

This may sound abstract, but with Mosaic on your screen, it is suddenly, strikingly concrete. All the documents in the Web are within reach. What path will you take to get to them? What path will you mark for others to take?

Going Commercial

Although the NCSA versions of Mosaic are still free, a number of for-profit software companies have purchased nonexclusive licenses to sell and support it. The exception is Jim Clark's Mosaic Communications, which, rather than license the source code, simply hired a half dozen programmers away from the NCSA in order to reengineer a Mosaic-like browser of its own. To license Mosaic, as of July 1994, the NCSA is charging an initial fee of US$100,000 plus $5 each for any number of copies. Licensees are encouraged to enhance Mosaic and resell it to consumers. In June, Fujitsu announced a Japanese Mosaic priced at Yen5,000 (about US$50). SPRY Inc., in partnership with O'Reilly and Associates, a San Francisco Bay area publishing company, plans to have a shrink-wrapped, user-friendly product called "Internet in a Box," including Mosaic, on the shelves by fall.

Jeff Stockett has other plans. He is one of the owners of Quadralay Corporation, a Mosaic licensee in Austin, Texas, that is retooling the browser slightly and repackaging it as an online customer support and service system. Quadralay has also announced a consumer version of Mosaic for Windows, officially priced at US$249. Stockett admits that Mosaic is not the last word in browsers. "There may be something that comes tomorrow that transcends anything we have seen thus far," he says. "Sometimes I think that Mosaic may be the VisiCalc of the '90s."

Maybe, but, then again, maybe not. "When VisiCalc first came out, it could run on every damned 8086 in the known universe, with nothing added, nothing extra," writes Rob Raisch, president of The Internet Company, a technical services firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Raisch insists that the current network is simply not ready for Mosaic and estimates that because graphical Web browsers like Mosaic require a high-speed connection to the Internet, they can run on no more than 2 percent of all currently Internet-connected machines.

On the other hand, entrepreneurs like Stockett know that VisiCalc - a simple spreadsheet program for personal computers - eventually morphed into Lotus 1-2-3 and helped launch a complete transformation in business computing. Mosaic's impact could be even larger, for its potential market includes not only businesses, but every individual who wants access to electronic information. Consumers whose Web browsers choke on the incoming data are likely to join the clamor for a better network with higher bandwidth. Whether the Net can answer this demand - technically, commercially, and socially - remains to be seen. "If people continue to sell Mosaic as the easy way to market to more than 25 million willing Internet consumers, we are heading for a 'marketing crash' of immense proportions," Rob Raisch warns.

One thing is clear: with the commercialization of Mosaic, the global network of hypertext is no longer just a very cool idea. It is now a global competition. The second phase of the revolution is about to begin.

The Man and the Myth

I first meet Marc Andreessen, accompanied by his publicist Rosanne Siino, in the fifth-floor reception area of Mosaic Communications's Silicon Valley headquarters. As Andreessen gets a glass of water from the nearby kitchen, he takes approving notice of the stash of Oreo cookies in the cabinet. We retire to a conference room, which is bare except for a table, chairs, and a large jar of M&Ms.

Andreessen mentions that at night, when the office is full and the tables are littered with pizza boxes, Mosaic Communications doesn't seem all that different from the environment back at the NCSA. But this afternoon, the comparison seems forced. Other than Siino and a receptionist, there is nobody else in the office. The air-circulation system is humming. The setting is quiet and corporate. A little way into the interview, Andreessen removes his dress shirt and answers the rest of my questions in a white T-shirt. This gesture, combined with cautious answers to my questions, leaves the impression of a man doing battle against the businesslike backdrop - and losing.

Two years ago, Andreessen was one of a handful of programmers who were taking an interest in Tim Berners-Lee's research on the World Wide Web. To Andreessen, who says he majored in computer science because electrical engineering was too much work, the lack of an easy-to-use graphical interface for the Web was a glaring omission.

"There was this huge hole in the world," says Andreessen, "because a network existed with all these people hooked up to it, and the software was 10 years behind the hardware. This is typical of the personal computer industry today," he continues. "Perhaps because of people like me." Andreessen argues that people who write software are often people who, like him, are daunted by building hardware. Therefore the machines outstrip our capacity to use them.

When Andreessen's first Mosaic release at the beginning of 1993 seemed to strike a chord with Web users, other developers joined in the effort. Chris Wilson, 24, who now works for SPRY Inc., went to work on a Windows version. The center retained ownership of the software but made it available free for individual use. As Mosaic spread through the Internet, Wilson could see problems looming. It was tricky to load and operate, and users around the world began besieging the NCSA with demands for help. "The center was just getting swamped," says Wilson. "They were hiring new people as quickly as they could, and there was no way to get through the backlog."

"We got calls from people saying, 'How can we get it?'" Andreessen recalls. "Then we got calls saying, 'What do we need to run it?' We even got a couple of calls saying, 'Do you need to have a computer?'"

As the Mosaic craze grew, commercial pressure on the young developers was also mounting. The NCSA's mission includes "technology transfer" - the licensing of its inventions to commercial companies. But the developers were not likely to see much of the profit. "Companies started to come to us," reports Andreessen. "They were saying: 'Let us have it, how much do we pay? We'll give you money!'"

Neither Andreessen nor Wilson enjoyed being in an environment with many of the pressures of a commercial software company, including user support, and none of the rewards. "It wasn't clear where we stood," Wilson says. "All of a sudden we were working for money, but it wasn't admitted we were working for money. There was a lot of discontent building up." By early 1994, Wilson had left the NCSA and joined SPRY.

Andreessen also left the NCSA, departing in December 1993 with the intention of abandoning Mosaic development altogether. He moved to California and took a position with a small software company. But within a few months he had quit his new job and formed a partnership with SGI founder Jim Clark.

"At the NCSA," Andreessen explains, "the deputy director suggested that we should start a company, but we didn't know how. We had no clue. How do you start something like that? How do you raise the money? Well, I came out here and met Jim, and all of a sudden the answers starting falling into place."

In March, Andreessen and Clark flew back to Illinois, rented a suite at the University Inn, and invited about half a dozen of the NCSA's main Mosaic developers over for a chat. Clark spent some time with each of them alone. By May, virtually the entire ex-NCSA development group was working for Mosaic Communications.

Andreessen answers accusations that corporate Mosaic Communications "raided" nonprofit NCSA by pointing out that with the explosion of commercial interest in Mosaic, the developers were bound to be getting other offers to jump ship. "We originally were going to fly them out to California individually over a period of several weeks," Andreessen explains, "but Jim and I said, Waita second, it does not make much sense to leave them available to be picked up by other companies. So we flew out to Illinois at the spur of the moment."

Since Mosaic Communications now has possession of the core team of Mosaic developers from NCSA, the company sees no reason to pay any licensing fees for NCSA Mosaic. Andreessen and his team intend to rewrite the code, alter the name, and produce a browser that looks similar and works better.

The Anti-Gates

Clark and Andreessen have different goals. For Jim Clark, whose old company led the revolution in high-end digital graphics, Mosaic Communications represents an opportunity to transform a large sector of the computer industry a second time. For Andreessen, Mosaic Communications offers a chance to keep him free from the grip of a company he sees as one of the forces of darkness - Microsoft.

"If the company does well, I do pretty well," says Andreessen. "If the company doesn't do well" - his voice takes on a note of mock despair - "I work at Microsoft."

The chair of Microsoft is anathema to many young software developers, but to Andreessen he is a particularly appropriate nemesis. Andreessen believes that Mosaic could become the standard front end to the Net, a universal gateway to the entire stream of digital information. The young developer hopes that the momentum toward a global data environment will create an insatiable demand for Mosaic Communications's proprietary browser. Mosaic, in this scenario, is the DOS/Windows of cyberspace, an achievement that would make its young creators the new millennium's first computer zillionaires.

Of course, there are a few barriers standing in the way, not least of which is the real-life Bill Gates, who is hardly prepared to cede the field. Microsoft has its own ideas about the front end of the Net. Gates is working with cable mogul John Malone to design a set-top box that will control digital televisions attached to the coaxial wires owned by the cable industry. In the short term, Microsoft is casually announcing that the new version of its Windows operating system will be "Internet-ready, right out of the box." Such promises may be mere braggadocio, but the young Mosaic developers know that in leaving the world of the Internet and going after the desktop market they are poaching on the estates of powerful industry notables. When they describe the future of Mosaic, Bill Gates is never far from their minds. "Microsoft, what are they going to do?" asks Andreessen. "The moment Microsoft jumps in, the rules change."

At SPRY, Chris Wilson expresses a hope that the momentum of the Web will keep Microsoft at bay. "It could be that Microsoft is going to announce the release of something that has a completely different form of networking," he says. "It is theoretically possible that they could crush us all. But I doubt that. Right now the World Wide Web and Mosaic have so much steam built up."

What the Mosaic vendors have going for them, aside from the sheer appeal of their browser, are the established technical and philosophical tendencies of the network world. The popularity of the World Wide Web rests upon the way it satisfies the desire of individuals and groups to make their information universally available, while not imposing any single standard of hardware or software. Tim Berners-Lee, who helped create the Web, is now directing an international effort to extend the Web's capabilities while maintaining an open and platform-neutral environment.

Based on this open environment, developers around the world are working on some stunning enhancements to the Web, including better page-layout techniques; artificial-intelligence search engines; smart, distributed data-storage methods; and even interactive, Web-based, virtual reality environments. David Raggett, who is on the technical staff of Hewlett-Packard's research labs in Bristol, England, and who is helping to develop the specifications for the next generation of Web documents, speaks of how the Web could accommodate the millions of new users expected to arrive in the coming months. He imagines the different computers on the Web sharing data in such a way that the most popular information is replicated onto many machines, while the least popular information lives on a single machine. Addresses, in the conventional sense, would disappear. No human being would know where any specific piece of information was stored. The Web would shift its data around automatically, while users could retrieve documents simply by knowing their names. The Web, in this scheme, becomes unlocatable and omnipresent.

At MIT, a researcher named John Mallery points out how primitive the Web's links are today. They are fun, he agreed, but they are not smart. You can find information on the Web only by drifting through the links other users have created or by knowing the specific address of the document. But if documents and parts of documents were catalogued in more complicated ways, the system itself could build links. Browsing a magazine on the Web might automatically generate links to other magazines. Looking at an archive of photographs of flowers might automatically create links to a botanical database. "With these kinds of systems," says Mallery, "the goal is referential integration. You've got all these people, and people are cultural - the individual has cultural software that he is running. As that culture is expressed electronically, you can integrate it into the Web. You can build a knowledge base that can draw on the experience of not just the individual or a limited group, but a whole country or planet." In Mallery's view, the Web is destined to become not only omnipresent, but also, in a sense, omniscient.

Perhaps the most intriguing experiment in Web development is the attempt to create a standard for interactive, virtual-reality environments. According to Hewlett-Packard's Raggett, some of the elements, such as giving a 3-D view and allowing movement and interactivity (for instance, clocks that tick louder as the user approaches), require surprisingly little bandwidth. And there is an ongoing effort to develop practical, present-day virtual reality tools. (For more information, visit http://vrml.wired.com/.) "The approach we are taking now," Raggett says, "is to keep it simple. Get some simple virtual-reality browsers out there. That will motivate people and begin to create opportunities."

The Commercial Conundrum

Interestingly, at the practical level of commercial Mosaic development, both Wilson and Andreessen expressed doubt about whether the World Wide Web can maintain its open yet unified environment. To keep the Web from fragmenting into smaller communities with more rigid technical requirements, the authors of Web tools will have to share their ideas and coordinate the development of new standards. This is fine in the nonprofit research and academic worlds. But in the private sector, coordination could mean a sacrifice of competitive advantage. Mosaic Communications could hardly become the DOS of cyberspace if it developed its product in a way that encouraged competition from scores of other more or less interchangeable Mosaic browsers. Mosaic Communications has figured this out, which may be why Andreessen no longer shares much information with his colleagues outside the company.

"At this point I see a lot of fragmentation," Wilson complains. "We are forging ahead in areas that need guidance - in security for instance. That is going to take a lot of standards work. I would like to see what happens with the other companies, and with Mosaic Communications especially. I haven't heard a lot from them."

The reason Wilson and other Mosaic developers have not heard much from Mosaic Communications lately, Andreessen admits, is that a unified standard is not of first importance to the company. "Our major concern is our products," he says. "On top of that, we would like to be in an open environment, where other browsers could read our documents. It makes companies and consumers more willing to buy in. But it can't be our primary concern.

"We are not going to let it slow us down," he continues.

"If we are moving faster than everybody else, then we will simply publish what we have done. We will say, 'This is how it is done, this is how you write documents to it.' We will have our implementation out there, and we will be competing on the basis of quality."

As we talk, I sense that Andreessen anticipates that other Mosaic developers will be irritated by his approach. The reason is obvious: if Mosaic Communications releases a stunning version of Mosaic and everybody begins to use it, and if the new version or a later upgrade is not compatible with competing Web browsers, then the rest of the Mosaic companies are going to have to get in step with Mosaic Communications or go out of business. Mosaic Communications is going to be in the position of setting the standards. This top-down approach to standards development is well known: it's the Microsoft model. Andreessen admits that it does not always lead to the most logical standards or the best products. He pauses to tell a well-known Microsoft joke: "How many Microsoft engineers does it take to change a light bulb? None, they just declare darkness the standard."

Of course, a top-down effort to define the standards of the Web may simply fail. Most Web developers I spoke with seemed to think that Mosaic Communications was taking the wrong approach. They were confident that better browsers than Mosaic would be released in short order, and any temporary benefit Mosaic Communications gained from hiring so many developers from the NCSA would quickly disappear as more and more people got into the game.

As I reviewed my notes from interviews with Andreessen, I was struck by the thought that he may have conjured the Bill Gates nemesis out of the subtle miasma of his own ambivalence. After all it is he, not the programmers in Redmond, Washington, who is writing a proprietary Web browser. It is he, not Bill Gates, who is at the center of the new, ambitious industry. It is he who is being forced by the traditional logic of the software industry to operate with a caution that verges on secrecy, a caution that is distinctly at odds with the open environment of the Web.

When I ask Andreessen about how Mosaic Communications's Mosaic will reach consumers, he will not answer directly. He makes it clear that his company does not intend to put a shrink-wrapped product on the shelves. He implies that Mosaic Communications's Mosaic will be licensed and shipped with "Internet-ready" computers and operating systems. But if Andreessen wants to get Mosaic onto the desktop in this manner, then the partnership choice is obvious. Would Mosaic Communications do a deal with Bill Gates?

Marc Andreessen isn't telling. "The overriding danger to an open standard is Microsoft," he says. But at the end of our interview, while we are still dancing around the marketing question, Andreessen attempts to resolve it by simply stating his ambition. "One way or another," he says, "I think that Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world."

I wait for more.

"One way or another," he repeats.

Mosaic is a graphical browser for the Web. Say what?The World Wide Web (aka WWW, the Web) is a unified "information space" that consists of hypertext documents and links between documents. Hypertext is a word coined by Ted Nelson to describe a seamless world of information, in which any part of any document can be linked to any part of any other document.

A Web browser is a computer program that retrieves and interprets documents on the World Wide Web. Mosaic is a browser that offers a graphical user interface, but not all browsers do. Lynx, for instance, is a popular text-only browser.

HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is the high-level programming language in which World Wide Web documents are written.

A SLIP (Serial Line Internet Protocol) connection provides a way for hosts and networks to link into the Internet via phone lines.

The URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the address of a document on the World Wide Web.

Why I Dig MosaicLast night Mosaic blew my mind. It was not the underlying technical elegance of the browser, for Mosaic functions lurchingly, with many gasps and wheezes. Images traveling through the Net don't appear quickly, even when they flow through a 56-KByte line. But Mosaic blew my mind nonetheless. With seamless grace, it brought me in contact with information that I didn't know I wanted to know.

I launched Mosaic for a prosaic reason: to track down some details about the World Wide Web on the pages at CERN in Geneva. But I typed the address incorrectly - or had copied it down wrong - and I soon found myself wandering aimlessly along the interwoven strands of the Web, listlessly clicking on links, circling in the near vicinity of CERN (not geographically, of course, but along vectors of association), hoping in a rather lame way to hit on the document I was looking for. Finally, I found myself standing on the NCSA demo page, much as tourists wandering through the complex alleys of an old city will, when their energy runs out, eventually walk along with the flow of traffic and find themselves in one of the main intersections or town squares.

Many documents are linked into the NCSA demo page, which is full of links leading out into the Web. I scanned down the lines of gray text and selected a blue link that had nothing to do with my official mission: "An experiment in hypermedia publishing: excerpts and audio from a book reading by author Paul Kafka of his novel LOVE Enter," it said. This, I hoped, would be a nice breather.

Upon entering the page, I was immediately distracted by another link, a quiet alcove halfway down that read "poetry archive". I wanted to see the poetry archive. I clicked. "Unable to connect to remote host," Mosaic responded. I was peeved. The door was locked! I clicked a link at the bottom of the screen, where the name of the author of the page was listed: Paul Mende. After a minute of waiting (not unusual), Mende's picture appeared. He was smiling and young, with bushy brown hair and a large mustache. His page listed his research interests: "String Theory, Quantum Chromdynamics." Then came a section called Odds and Ends, under which were listed New Fiction and Readings, Benjamin's Home Page, and "local docs." What were the local docs? Who was Benjamin?

Before finding out, I glanced at the rest of the document, and it was then that I began to experience the vertigo of Net travel. On the lower parts of the page were abstracts of Paul's scientific papers, some co-authored with Benjamin Grinstein. "High energy string collisions in a compact space," was one of the titles. This meant nothing to me, of course. But, having sought a respite in poetry, it was dizzying to have wandered into the company of a physicist.

It was a type of voyeurism, yes, but it was less like peeking into a person's window and more like dropping in on a small seminar with a cloak of invisibility.

One thing it was not like: it was not like being in a library. The whole experience gave an intense illusion, not of information, but of personality. I had been treating the ether as a kind of data repository, and I suddenly found myself in the confines of a scientist's study, complete with family pictures.

When I clicked on the link titled Benjamin's Home Page, I found that it did not belong to Benjamin Grinstein, Paul's scientific co-author, but rather to Benjamin Mende, his son, a beaming, gap-toothed 3-year-old, who announced at the top of the page that his research interests were, "Sand. Also music, boats, playing outside."

"Playing outside" was a link to a picture that filled my 21-inch screen. Benjamin was sitting on the grass in a hooded sweatshirt, wearing corduroy booties, laughing.

It was late. I'd been in Paul Mende's life for an hour. I turned the computer off. It was not until this morning that I remembered I had never made it back to CERN.

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